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Desperately we jumped from floe to floe, slip- ping,
falling, escaping death in the icy waters.
(At left) The author.
continued on page 162
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Fleeing from Siberia and the dreaded Russian "Ogpu," these two men try crossing the treacherous floating ice of Bering Strait· on foot to America-the first white men to make the attempt and live to tell the tale!
We Walked the Bering Strait
by VLADIMIR MURAVIEFF
Illustration by Forrest C. Crooks
Photographs by Lazarnick
My FRIEND and I es caped from the Soviets by walking from Siberia to America. We fled over the floating ice of the Bering Strait, the first humans to do so, as far as we know, and we lived to tell the tale.
I was born in South Russia, in 1906. My father was a bank manager in a large city, my elder brother an army officer. Brother disappeared without a trace during the war; I think he was killed. Shortly after the Soviets gained power in our region, the Cheka agents arrested my father and mother. There was no charge against them other than that they were members of the bourgeoisie. I never saw them afterwards.
At the time of their arrest I was fifteen years old. An uncle of mine took care of me. However, he was in the state employ and feared for his position. He wrote to X, a celebrated Bolshevik leader, whom he happened to know personally from former times when the man was hunted by the Czar's police. X remembered my uncle's past kindnesses to him, and though he would do nothing for my parents, he agreed to help me.
With his aid and protection I was sent to school in Leningrad, away from the region where my family was known.
I grew up under the Soviets. As a student of engineering, I was sent to factories and mines during my summer vacations. I worked as a factory hand and as a miner, contributing to the upbuilding of the new Socialist republic, preparing to be an engineer for the state.
All this time I was gnawed by the thought of my parents. I wanted to know what had happened to them, but I could not ask; it would have meant my end.
And then the blow fell. X sided with Trotsky, and soon was exiled to Siberia, a broken man. He is still there.
With X's protection gone, I feared for my life. I felt I must flee from my country.
But where and how? Escape from the Soviets was almost impossible. The frontiers were closely guarded.
One summer I was sent on an expedition to the Urals in search of mineral and metal deposits. While there, my thoughts and plans turned eastward. How about Kamchatka? Was it not one of the frontier lands of Russia? Did not America-a foreign haven-lie beyond it?
I asked for, and was given, a transfer to Kamchatka, to survey it for mineralogical possibilities. By easy stages, I made my way to its northernmost point-an unguarded frontier, the only one in Russia.
However, nature guarded this land effectively. No one had ever tried to cross the strait to the American side, for the madness of such an attempt was only too apparent. But I decided . . .
The storm ceased. The March air was still, except for the muffled pounding of ice breaking far out at sea. Toward evening, in the brilliant light of the aurora borealis, Ivan and I said good-by to the Chukchi and Eskimo inhabitants of the Cape Deshnef settlement and walked from the Siberian shore onto the ice of Bering Strait. We walked toward America, toward Alaska, sixty-four miles away.
I carried my skis on my shoulder for a while, but soon decided that the ice was smooth enough to use them, Ivan could not ski, so we tied one end of a strong rope around his middle, and the other end around mine. I struck out ahead, and Ivan walked and slid after me, holding the rope with both hands.
We were proud of ourselves. Here we were-I, a young mining engineer of twenty-three, a wide-eyed native of the Dnieper steppes; Ivan, an oil-worker from Baku, fifteen years my senior-two South Russians, unused to the arctic weather, yet pushing toward our goal.
My mining duties had taken me through European Russia to Middle Asia, then through Siberia until I had reached Kamchatka. There, in a Chukchi hut, I had met Ivan. Several months before, he had been sent by steamer from the Caucasus to the Soviet oil fields of Saghalin, but on reaching Vladivostok he had been tempted to ship on a Kamchatka fishing boat, and later left it at Cape Deshnef for no particular reason, Now he was on his way to America.
The ice was rough. Besides jutting blocks and ragged edges, we were encountering fissures from two to eight feet in width. The water was black and menacing in these fissures. On my skis I easily bridged the openings, but it was a different matter for Ivan.
We moved slowly, picking our way with care. Thus we proceeded for two miles, when a difficult jump brought a minor catastrophe. My left ski struck the side of an ice hill and broke, and my right foot went into the water.
I extracted it quickly, but in the process the right ski was also broken. Silently, we took the remnants of the skis off my feet and flung them away. We disengaged the rope. Silently we walked on.
My right foot was wet, but we were dressed to guard ourselves from soaking and freezing. We wore shirts of reindeer hide next to the skin as the natives had advised. Over the shirts were jackets of similar hide, with the fur turned outward. The jackets had deer-hide hoods attached to them. Under the hoods our faces were almost invisible. Over the jackets and hoods we had short garments, also hooded, but of light cloth so that we'd merge with the ice and snow if we should meet polar bears.
Each of us had on two pairs of trousers. The nether pair was of deer hide, with the fur to the outside. The outer pair was of sealskin, tightly fitting around the girdle and the ankles, so as not to let in the water. On our feet we had pidgiki, or socks of incredibly soft and warm fawn hide, and maklaki, or sealskin boots reaching almost to the knees.
Ivan carried our supply of seal meat, which was light, soft to bite and chew, and very nourishing. Ivan also insisted on carrying the gun, the field glass and the compass.
We walked through the long night, and the next day and the next. With our knives we cut off pieces of meat, which we ate as we walked, But the meat was too cold, and so we put small pieces in our pockets next to our bodies to warm them for our next meal.
We stopped occasionally for brief rest, but we rested standing up. We did not sit down for fear of falling asleep.
According to our previous calculations, two days should have sufficed for us to reach at least one of the islands in the strait near the American side. But by the end of two days of slow walking, we had covered no more than ten miles.
We came now to the top of a pile of ice blocks, where a terrific storm struck us. The wind howled, and a cold rain beat down. The ice was breaking, clashing, thundering all around us. And presently we saw that we were on an ice floe, being carried by the current and the wind into the unknown.
A thick fog came, and we could not make use of our compass. We sat down, promising each other not to fall asleep; reminding each other that it would be our last sleep once we closed our eyes.
Thus, days and nights passed while we sat mutely, somewhere in space, cut off from the rest of the world, carried by the wild sea-carried whither? There we sat. . .
The storm had raged for three days when gusts of warmer wind indicated that we were being driven in a northerly direction, toward the Arctic Ocean. If only it would veer toward the northeast, toward our goal!
Suddenly Ivan raised his head, pointed and yelled: "There is an island! Look!"
I looked to the south and through the receding fog saw a line. "It must be the Big Diomede!" I shouted back.
Ivan nodded.
This, I believe, was the sixth day of our adventure.
"We must make for that island," I said.
Now it was barely visible, but we jumped from block to block, from fioe to fioe, desperately watching our objective. I We jumped and walked, we ran and I jumped again, but the current was swift, I and it carried us away from the island.
It grew colder. At times we slipped and fell on the ice, bruising the skin of our cheeks and noses, but we picked our- selves up and pushed on.
Often we came out upon wide ice fields covered with polar snow. They were easy to walk on, except when the wind whisked the snow off these plains and whirled it around us, blinding us, filling our gasping mouths with snowflakes and ice chips, instilling fear into our hearts.
"Don't give up!" I cried.
"No, don't give up!" seconded Ivan, somewhere ahead of me. Suddenly there was a splash.
I ran forward and stopped on the brink of an opening. There in the dark, angry water, threshed Ivan. Ice blocks milled around him, pushing him-grinding him.
"Hold on!" I yelled, throwing the rope to him.
With clumsy, stiff movements he swam toward the rope. An ice block came suddenly between him and me. He pushed it aside and lunged for the rope, disappearing from my view,
But now I felt a pull at the rope. I strained at it. I felt that I was being dragged into the fissure, but I pulled back, and now Ivan appeared from beyond the floating obstruction and clung to the edge of my ice block. He started to climb, and I helped him, and finally he was on the ice by my side.
We lay there exhausted and panting. We were wet to the bone and half frozen, but we knew we were doomed to death if we remained in that state. So I kicked Ivan and yelled at him, and finally he rose and we ran over the ice floes in the direction of the island, for there was no straight course for us, but a zigzaggy one, from floe to floe, all milling and crashing around us.
Nights were dark now, and movement was impossible, During the long blackness we crouched on our ice block awaiting the dawn, yet fearing it, for it might reveal that the island was gone. But each morning the island was there, a teasing unattainable line, I do not remember how many nights we lived through: maybe no more than two; maybe as many as seven. Time had stopped.
One day the sun pushed through the clouds, and so brilliant was the ice that I became snow-blind. Soon I was able to see only as through a veil. Thereafter I had to move slowly.
The snow was now behind us; there was ice only, and it was salty ice. We had no fresh water with us, and we suffered from thirst. Blisters appeared inside our mouths and on our lips. We could scarcely converse. And then, fortunately, my filmed eyes spotted a piece of ice distinguished from the rest by its dark blue color.
"It-must-be-fresh-water ice," I mumbled.
Ivan bent and chipped the dark blue ice with his knife. We tasted the chips. Yes, they were fresh water.
The problem of food was becoming serious. In his plunge Ivan had dropped not only the gun and the compass but also our main supply of seal meat. There had been left only the small pieces of meat we had stuffed into our pockets. But now these were gone. So we decided to eat our sealskin gloves.
Even here the realization of our position imposed strict economy: one glove a day for each was all we could afford to consume. But we were still hungry, so Ivan suggested that we add to our menu parts of the sleeves of his jacket and the uppers of his boots. All these, soaked in the water during his plunge, now seemed too long. We ate them.
But the frost returned once more and shrunk the hide, and to our horror we saw that the sleeves of Ivan's jacket reached only to his elbows, while his boots were like low shoes.
The ice continued to move in a northerly direction, carrying us with it. It grew colder and colder. Stubbornly we continued to walk toward the island, half-blind, our hands and feet swollen to twice their normal size.
Now a strip of clear water four or five miles across separated us from the shore. We moved closer and closer to the shore, but repeatedly the current pushed the ice back, and the island receded.
We were cold, hungry, miserable. Our stiff, frozen garments had long ceased to give any warmth. "This is the end," I thought.
Suddenly Ivan called out through his bleeding, rigid lips: "Muravieff, we shall live now! Look! There is a seal. I'll get it. It is I who lost all our food, and it's up to me to kill that seal!"
So saying, knife in hand, he jumped upon the ice block where the seal was reposing. The dozing animal woke and plunged into the sea. I turned back and strained my weak eyes to watch my friend, and when finally I spotted him, he was about a hundred and fifty feet away from me. The distance was rapidly lengthening, as his ice block was now moving away from mine.
I heard him call to me. Desperately I cried: "Wait! I'm coming to you!"
I jumped from one ice hill to another trying to reach him, and I fell into a crevice I had not noticed. Something snapped and hurt in my right side. I breathed with great effort, but I managed to crawl up the icy slope to the top.
Without seeing Ivan, I waved and shouted. My voice was weak, but he responded, and I tried to guide my movements by his calls. For hours we thus moved, jumping, crawling, walking, slipping, calling to each other, encouraging each other. At last we met.
It was growing dark, but soon the ribbonlike aurora borealis came to our aid, lighting the scene with its multicolored, eerie beams. The wind was swinging us to and fro on our ice block, drenching us at intervals with spray. Here and there huge flat pieces of ice would warp and then split, forming dangerous hollows.
At times this split ice would close up again over the hollows. Had we found ourselves in one of these hollows, the moving ice would have cut us in two or buried us under its cold, glistening surface. By this time we were so weakened that we looked at these traps indifferently. We had not eaten in three days.
The island-where was it now? In the weird light of the aurora, as far as we could make out, we were now no more than half a mile north of it.
The flat ice block, on which we were now floating, moved toward the rocky shore. When we were no more than forty-five feet away, a strong wave came out to meet us, caught our ice block and dashed it against the rocks.
Amid the shower of breaking ice, we were thrown upon the shore.
Ivan shouted. I could not hear his words. I clung to one rock, then to another. I was safe on solid earth! And a short distance away was Ivan, also safe.
He stumbled toward me, weeping. Almost blind, the right side of my body shattered, I lay on the rocks, half dead.
I do not know how long I lay there, but presently I heard dogs barking and men talking on the cliffs above us.
Two dogs came down, leaping from stone to stone. They sniffed at us and licked my face. Then two Eskimo men descended on ropes. Ivan explained our adventure and plight to them, mostly by gestures. They stared at us in wonder, but soon set to work.
Carefully they hoisted us up to the top of the cliffs. In this they were aided by three other Eskimos who had remained above. Then they took us to their habitations on a dog-driven sled.
The entire camp came out to meet us. As soon as the sled halted, they lifted us gently and carried us into one of their cavelike dwellings. We were placed on a sort of bed, and immediately our garments were changed to fresh, warm underwear. Water was heated and we were washed. Then dinner, consisting of very palatable fish and strong, aromatic American coffee. Now, not only Ivan but I, too, wept with joy.
"Is this an American island?" I asked.
"No, it is the Big Diomede," answered the Eskimos. "It's the last bit of the Soviet Union. Three miles from here is the Little Diomede, and that's America. There is an American school there, with American teachers."
We stayed on the Big Diomede for two weeks. We slept almost continuously, except when awakened for our meals. Occasionally an Eskimo girl would awaken me to apply a cold wet cloth to my eyes, which were still weak. Gradually we grew stronger and began to plan for the rest of our journey.
One day we bade farewell to our kind hosts and crossed to the American island. The crossing was easy and safe, as the ice here was solid.
On the American shore we were met by a gay crowd of Eskimos, who seemed to know all about our adventure and now welcomed us to the New World. The American flag flew over the school, and the two American teachers came out with cordial greetings.
This island was separated from the Alaskan shore by only a few miles. One day Ivan and I climbed an elevation from which we could see the vague outlines of eastern Asia-that same Cape Deshnef where not so long before we had started our crossing. Now it seemed near, no more than forty or fifty miles, but we knew that in our zigzag journey across the Bering Strait we had walked and floated at least ninety miles!
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